#DrupalVote: Meet the Candidates Round 1
Voting for the Drupal Association Board begins March 7, 2016 and lasts until March 18. If you want more information about my work in the Drupal community, visit my candidate profile on Drupal.org.
On February 24, me and several other Drupal professionals met to discuss our candidacies for the Drupal Association board. Below are some of the key questions asked, along with my answers.
The term for members-at-large has been extended to two years; at the end of your two-year term, what would you like to say you got done?
For me, what I love most is finding opportunities for people to work together and figuring out which people need to be in the room in order to get things done. At Drupalcon Austin, I was able to catalyze a consensus among front-end developers around the use of CSS classes in core templates by working with MortenDK to map out the different perspectives in play, and then finding people who shared these different perspectives to join the conversation. The result was the Drupal Frontend Consensus Banana (don’t ask me why it’s called that), which brought the Stable and Classy themes to Drupal 8 core.
Another way I could see myself contributing to the board is by helping to organize design and UX sprints at Drupal events. To be effective, designers need context for the problem space they’re working in, and they need to understand who they need to work with — either to get the information they need to inform the design, or to gain approval for the final design. By creating a repeatable process for organizing design sprints, we could increase the number of design contributors by giving them a set of steps to go through to plan an event.
Service on the Board is different than many of the roles you play in the community. It’s more strategic role, so you get to set a longer-term direction for how to move the community forward instead of focusing on the day-to-day. How do you see being a board member as different from being a community member?
From the time I started contributing to Drupal, it felt more important for me to do drupal.org than Drupal itself. I’m an information architect and researcher, and I do UX strategy for large, content-heavy websites. I’m also obsessed with helping people get their work done and find the things they need to get it done. This makes my skills and interests particularly valuable for issues like community and process documentation, work on the tools the community uses, and other pursuits I’ve been part of. Being on the Board cements my involvement with the Drupal community beyond my current level of contribution, which mostly revolves around showing up at contribution sprints and asking, “how can I help?”
What is it that the Association can do to be less Americanized? How can we embrace the range of cultures that make up the Drupal community.
During my thesis research, when I was doing some research with the French Drupal community, one of the first things I noticed is that they have their own Drupal.org. This happens for a very specific reason — according to French law, any information that is provided to French citizens (or software sold to them) must be at least as understandable in French as in any other language. One of the easiest ways to clarify the global position of the Drupal Association is to make Drupal.org multilingual, and to ensure there are people across the world who are helping to translate its content.
In terms of whether each country/region should have its own Association, I don’t actually mind having different versions of the Association as long as the different groups communicate with each other. It’s really difficult for volunteer-driven organizations to manage effectively when they’re trying to work together in different regions. Each culture has its own unique needs, which are difficult to accommodate through a single organization.
Last year, Drupal Association decided to fund Drupal 8 in a way they haven’t before with the D8 Accelerate program. Do you feel like there’s room for more or different types of programs like this?
There were a lot of exceptional situations with Drupal 8. Prior to 8, we didn’t have Views or WYSIWYG in Core. We also completely changed much of the architecture, including the theme engine. All this work made a significantly better product, but also made the implementation of these changes infinitely more complex.
Most big modules are sponsored by one Drupal shop or another, and we’ve made the case for shops to hire people to just work on core. If we’re going to make that decision as a community, I don’t see why the DA can’t be part of that.
Back in May, we released issue/comment credits on Drupal.org. It’s been exciting to get more clarity on what the community is doing, but there have been concerned about “gamifying” contribution. Do you think the system we’ve put in place is achieving the goal of increasing contributions by making contribution more visible? How can we do better?
When you’re talking about gamification, generally people tend to assume that it’s badges, and they either get really annoyed or they really love it, because “badges!” The important thing is to be able to, from a macro level, demonstrate and understand the breadth of the ecosystem that contributes to Drupal, and it’s much larger than code commits.
It’s also important to recognize that a solely technological solution isn’t going to cut it. Most designers who do contribution aren’t doing their work in the Issue Queue; they’re having conversations with people at events, or collaborating over Skype. People who are running sprints and doing mentoring aren’t necessarily going to be hanging out in the Issue Queue; they’re going to be rolling up their sleeves at events helping other people get their work done. You have to find a technological solution and balance that with a human solution.
Voting for the Drupal Association Board begins March 7, 2016 and lasts until March 18. If you want more information about my work in the Drupal community, visit my candidate profile on Drupal.org.
